Eighteen Percent

Amazon just sent me, “a valued member of Amazon Prime”, an e-mail telling me they are raising the price for Prime from $10.99 to $12.99. Two dollars a month doesn’t seem like much, but it’s an 18% increase. How does Amazon justify an 18% increase when inflation has been negligible for years and Amazon has been raking in the profits? Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is now the richest person in the world. Money Magazine estimates his net worth at a paltry $90.6 billion.

Amazon is one of the so-called Frightful Five along with Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Farhad Manjoo writes about

. . . the core of the Frightful Five’s indomitability. They have each built several enormous technologies that are central to just about everything we do with computers. In tech jargon, they own many of the world’s most valuable “platforms” — the basic building blocks on which every other business, even would-be competitors, depend.

These platforms are inescapable; you may opt out of one or two of them, but together, they form a gilded mesh blanketing the entire economy.

So why is [many expletives deleted] Amazon demanding from me, just an old schmuck on a fixed income, an extra two dollars a month?

Should I cancel or just roll over in a submissive posture and accept the increase?